Linde bids to raise awareness

Linde Material Handling UK is one of the world’s heavyweight forklift brands but it has not rested on its laurels. The company has built on a high quality product offering with a range of value added services, a flavour of which is highlighted here.

Linde Aware

Linde Material Handling UK sales and marketing director Andrew Daly says the company has a lot to offer in the warehouse.

“The feedback we have had from customers is ‘you don’t tell us about everything you do’. We saw this as a challenge to better explain what we offer. As a result we created the Linde Aware sales tool, which is targeted at warehouse customers.”

Linde Aware is a graphical software tool that asks customers to highlight the relative importance of factors in their warehouse operation – such as employee productivity, having the ability to adapt quickly to change, warehouse space optimisation and speed of pick rate. The Linde salesperson can then outline the likely implications this will have for MHE use. This is then reviewed with the customer, giving an insight into the kind of package required.

“I like Linde Aware because it encourages our team to really understand what is going on with the customer, and the customer appreciates you showing interest in their priorities. Its about showing the breadth of what we do, we’re not just about trucks, we want to show the wealth of the service that can be tailored to the customer. We’ve had a few wins where this was the turning point.”

There is a growing trend in procurement to have purchasing professionals involved in the process alongside operational staff. This tool has helped Linde rise with this data-driven trend, as it ‘speaks a language purchasing professionals can understand, always emphasising tangible benefits,’ says Andrew.

“We spoke to purchasing people as well as the operations guys when we were designing Linde Aware. They said ‘sometimes you (forklift suppliers) all say the same things,” explains Andrew. 

“But if document (produced by the sales tool) can be attached when a recommendation is made to a company’s board, coupling a competitive price with a full range of products and services, it helps immensely with the final decision.”

Take the Linde Energy Challenge

Fuel efficiency is a key consideration with energy prices not getting any lower and MHE, by its nature, a traditionally heavy consumer of energy. Linde asserts that its trucks are significantly better performing than those of its rivals and is urging customers to independently put this to the test.

Andrew explains: “It’s another one of those situations where customers say ‘You (forklift suppliers) all say the same thing, you all say you’re the most fuel efficient’.

“Well, this year we’ve got customers to do their own tests. We’ve got independent data through TÜV SÜD – one of the world’s leading testing certification firms – to show our trucks are the most fuel efficient. 

“We say to customers – test it yourself, see what you find. We’ve done that with many customers, every one has come back with fuel efficiency savings higher than we predicted. We tend to predict 15% savings to be conservative, and they come back with 20-30%.”

Piloting a course in safety

Talking of emerging market trends, Andrew also outlines how he has heard more concern from customers in recent years about health and safety. 

“This is a growing concern among customers and they want to know what we can do to help them. This comes down to two aspects. First we must ensure our engineers are fully conversant with health and safety procedures on the customer’s site. We are training our people to understand that,” he says.

“The other side is the safety of the product, and we have developed a host of features to boost this. One example is a reversing proximity sensor, which we designed with building materials supplier CRH Group (See the case study CRH Group teams up with Linde to curtail collisions on the HSS website).

“We were also first to market with Blue Spot technology (which projects a warning light ahead of forklifts). Looking to the future, we will launching some exciting safety technology later this year.”

Linde also launched its latest reach truck (the R14-20 range) at IMHX in 2013, which counts safety and ergonomic gains among its many advances.

Andrew says: “Feedback has been very positive, it’s a genuine market leading product, the ergonomics have been radically improved, the stability and comfort are fantastic. We have done a lot of work on the oscillation of the mast, where you can get a lot of inefficiency and where safety risks lurk.”

2014 promises further developments of the reach truck range, although Andrew remained tight-lipped about what these will be.

“All I can say is we’ve shown this to some key customers in confidence and they have said  the efficiency gains they anticipate mean this could be a game changer.”

Short term options

Keeping abreast of new media and the latest technology, Linde has also launched smartphone friendly versions of its Used and Short Term Rental websites.

“We’re well known for new products and we want to make sure the market is equally aware of the STR and used offerings. In recent years we have been raising market awareness.

“Linde has the biggest STR fleet in the UK – 10,000 trucks. We’ve had customers we don’t deal with ring us and say their current supplier hasn’t been able to meet a demand, and nine times out of 10 we can. That gets us in to the customer, they see what our people, trucks and service can achieve. In fact, one or two big customers have used us for the first time through rental,” says Andrew.

IMHX 2013 was a great success for Linde, with the show providing an opportunity for the company to demonstrate how it tackles real world business issues such as efficiency, safety and environment and service, to name but a few. Each area of the stand was backed up by customer testimony. For Andrew, it’s all about how Linde can add value and highlighting that while Linde Material Handling UK is one of the world’s leading forklift brands, it has much more going on than simply truck technology.